One of the most common storage interfaces utilized in today's computers is the Integrated or Intelligent Drive Electronics (IDE) interface. IDE interfaces are also known as Advanced Technical Attachment (ATA) interfaces. Hard disk, CD ROM, floppy, and tape drives that have integrated controllers are very likely connected to an IDE interface channel in computers today. When a computer resets or powers on, connected IDE drives enter a diagnostic state and the basic input/output system (BIOS) executes a power on self-test (POST) for diagnostic and initialization purposes. IDE drive initialization is included in the POST process to prepare the IDE drive for operation during runtime.
Previous methods and systems for including a device or drive in the initialization process included manually recording the drive connection and location via a BIOS setup utility. These previous methods and systems are cumbersome, requiring a user to modify the setup utility whenever a drive is attached to or removed from the computer interface. As a result, costly additional human resources and time are required to include drives in POST diagnostics and initialization.
Present solutions for detecting the presence and location of an IDE drive before spending POST time for diagnostics and initialization of the drive, include a method for the BIOS to automatically detect whether an IDE drive is connected to the IDE interface channel of the computer system. However because these present solutions may detect the false presence of an IDE drive, valuable POST time is frequently wasted performing diagnostic and initialization procedures on non-existent IDE drives. Thus, the time of POST is increased and runtime is delayed because of false IDE drive detections.